How to get traffic to your blog on the first week

May 21st, 2009 Kevin Quinlan 1 comment

So I started this blog a week ago and my goal was to get 50 visitors in the first week. I think this is a modest goal but achievable. There are some of the big names in blogging that can create a new blog, link to an existing high traffic blog and the next thing they know they have thousands of readers in the first week. I am not that guy. I have five blogs and one of them averages a few thousand a week but the topic of the blog is completely different.

If you are going to create a second blog that is not related to the first, it is a tough to cross sell the traffic as the audience would not be interested in the new one. With that said, if you were going to start a brand new blog without any “flagship blog” to draw an audience from, how do you get traffic to your blog on the first week? Well here is what I have done and what has worked so far.

I submitted the URL to google and other search engines but this will take weeks if not months before it registers. Also with a competitive topic like blogging, I don’t expect to rank on the first few pages too soon so really need to get traffic in other avenues.

I wrote an article and submitted it to a few article directories. Again, this is more about creating backlinks to my blog then it is on getting traffic to the blog in the first week. Eventually maybe some websites might publish the articles and get me more backlinks but in the meantime, I am happy with the backlinks.

So what has worked to get traffic to my blog during week one? Two things:

1. Social Media: I have posted at least one article each day and when it goes live I stumble and digg it. Surprisingly this has resulted in a few readers coming my way. I think week one this is the most important way to get readers to your blog as it does not require the google spiders to read your content and can be done right away.
2. Comment on other blogs: I have tried to read and comment on at least five blogs each day and while this has only provided some of my traffic it has increased it some which in the first week is all you can ask for.

I think for week two I will set a goal to get 50 readers again. After that I will try and double it to 100 readers for weeks three and four.